Faculty Spotlight: Book Publication

   Dr. Ashok Kumar Malhotra will be signing copies of his latest book on “Grandpa Chopra’s Stories for Life Nourishment” at the Green Toad Bookstore at 7 p.m., Thursday, September 20, 2012.

   He will read and tell a few stories from the book as well as demonstrate a couple of Yoga postures. Audience members will be encouraged to participate. From the preface:

“Grandpa Chopra was a bubbling fountain of tales and fables from all over the world. Like a bee, he had collected more than two hundred fifty stories from the cultural gardens of India, China, Afghanistan and Iran as well as from the books of the Arabian Nights, Buddhist Jataka and Hindu Panchtantra Tales, Aesop’s Fables, epics of Mahabharata and Ramayana as well as the Bible. Though he had been educated only up to high school, he could speak more than six languages and was fluent in English, Hindi, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi and Urdu.
I spent my childhood days and teenage years listening to his great stories and almost memorized many of them by heart.
This is the first volume of forty stories where each one has a moral like that of the Aesop’s fables. The first twenty-two are from Grandpa Chopra and the remaining eighteen are from me under the heading of Grandpa Malhotra. I am retelling the Grandpa Chopra’s stories as I recall them. Since they are coming from many different sources as collected by Grandpa, a number of them might seem familiar because they have been around for centuries and told by various writers in their own ways. I am not their author but only a re-teller and a compiler. However, the stories under Grandpa Malhotra are drawn from my personal experiences and are retold with changed names to protect the privacy of those they are about.”

   Professor Ashok Kumar Malhotra is a distinguished teaching professor of philosophy at the State University of New York College at Oneonta. He is the winner of a dozen prestigious awards such as Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, East West Center Distinguished Alumni Award (USA), University of Hawaii Distinguished Alumni Award (USA), Gullands NRI Excellence Award (UK), Jewel of India Gold Award (India), Spiritual Leadership Award (USA), Bharat Excellence Award (India) and others. He has published 14 books on Indian, Chinese and Western Philosophy that include four books on Yoga and Meditation. He has also authored more than 100 articles. Malhotra is the founder of the Yoga and Meditation Society, has a “Gentle Yoga” TV program for the community and writes a monthly column on Yoga Life for the local newspaper. He is also the founder of the Ninash Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity that builds schools for the female and minority children of India.

   Malhotra will donate all his royalties received from the sale of this book to the Ninash Foundation (www.ninash.org).

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